New Deep Sea Mushrooms Defy Classification; Their Existence Could Change Our Understanding of Evolution [PHOTO]

A mushroom-shaped organism has been newly discovered by a team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen, who assert that it does not fit into any known subdivisions of the animal kingdom. Known as "D. enigmatica," the invertebrate was originally collected by Jean Just, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen from the Tasman Sea in the 1980s.

BBC reports that the organisms share several similarities to life forms known as "medusoids" that lived between 635 and 540 million years ago during the Edicarean period. They measure a few millimeters in size, and consist of a translucent flattened disk with a stalk-like mouth protruding from its end.

Tetyana Nosenko, a German evolutionary biologist, stated, "This discovery implies an exciting possibility that the deep-sea of Australia has preserved living descendants of the Edicara organisms, which were thought to be extinct over 500 million years ago," conveying just how monumental the discovery is to our present-day knowledge of evolutionary biology.

Leonid Moroz, a neurobiologist from the University of Florida, agrees. He told National Geographic, "[This could] completely reshape the tree of life, and even our understanding of how animals evolved, how neurosystems evolved, how different tissues evolved... It can rewrite whole textbooks in zoology."

National Geographic reports that if the organisms are actually related to the ancient "medusoids," their discovery would be reminiscent of the discovery of the coelacanth fish - a species thought to be long extinct - off the coast of South Africa in 1938. It would also pose the question of just how much of Earth's aquatic realm remains to be explored.

Unfortunately, genetic analysis of the creatures is improbable. When scientists first brought them up from the ocean depths, the creatures were preserved in formalin and then in ethanol, making later genetic analysis either very difficult or impossible. However, it is clear that there is no living animal that resembles "D. enigmatica," and the organisms' physical form suggests a representation of very early animal life.